What Amazon FBA Buyers Want in 2026 and How to Give It to Them

The landscape for selling an Amazon FBA business has shifted. Buyers now prioritize true net profit over top-line revenue numbers. In this video, we break down what actually moves the needle on Amazon FBA business valuations right now and how to position your company for a premium exit.

CHAPTERS:

0:00 The New Amazon Exit Landscape

00:35 Profit Margins vs. Revenue

01:02 Cash vs. Accrual Accounting

01:38 SKU-Level Unit Economics

02:48 The Chinese Copycat Threat

04:15 Operational Maturity & SKU Metrics

05:30 Realistic Growth vs. Hockey-Stick Charts

06:10 Creating a Turnkey Product Roadmap

06:55 What Drives Premium Multiples

TRANSCRIP

The New Amazon Exit Landscape

The Amazon landscape has changed. It’s not 2019 anymore. The days of throwing up a product, running some PPC, and printing money are over.

We talk to Amazon buyers constantly—strategics, private equity, individual operators—and what they’re looking for now is fundamentally different from what worked a few years ago.

If you’re running an FBA business and are thinking about an exit at some point, here’s what we think actually moves the needle on valuations right now.

Profit Margins vs. Revenue

Profit margins over revenue. Buyers have gotten burned chasing top-line revenue. Now they’re laser-focused on margins.

So what’s that look like? You’re doing $3 million a year in revenue, but your margins are thin. You’ve got ad spend. You’ve got Amazon fees. You’ve got cost of goods sold. You’ve got all sorts of product development costs.

And what you have is a very complex business, and you’re not making any money, or you’re not making enough money.

What we have found is that gross margin is the lifeblood of an Amazon business. We have seen too many sellers with 10% net margins get nearly wiped out by a single Amazon policy change.

What buyers are saying is they’ve seen too many acquisitions where the revenue looked great, but the unit economics fell apart under scrutiny.

Now they want to see your true net profit at the SKU level, or for Amazon, at the ASIN level, after everything, after all those costs.

Cash vs. Accrual Accounting

You know, a lot of people will file their tax returns on a cash basis. That’s what makes sense to them. But you can’t run a business on a cash basis, at least not if you want to really understand what’s going on day to day.

So let me give you an example.

Let’s say on December 15th, you have $100,000 that you need to spend on inventory. And so you wire that money to your supplier, and it hits the P&L.

If you’re on a cash basis, that P&L for December is going to show an expense for $100,000, but the products will not be sold until the following year.

So we want to be on accrual accounting.

Let’s just say that you sell one of your products. We want the cost of goods sold for that product to show, “I sold one product. I expensed one product.”

We don’t want to see extra bloat from other inventory that’s for future orders.

So when we’re on accrual accounting, what we’re doing is making sure that we’re only seeing the actual expenses that are affecting the day-to-day operations of the business, not cash flow decisions that you make or tax decisions that you make that might be setting you back.

SKU-Level Unit Economics

You need to understand what you’re making on every product sold.

You need to understand which products are dragging down my margins, whereas which products are actually increasing my margins.

You need to understand, is PPC dragging me down? Do I need to focus more on that?

If you don’t have a good handle on your numbers, you’re not going to be able to understand how to make the right decisions.

Gross margins and net margins are the lifeblood of the business.

Okay, here’s a bonus tip.

We have found that sellers can recover money from Amazon for overcharged fees and lost inventory.

We’ve even had people that have come to us and said, “I saved thousands of dollars by auditing my Amazon reports and looking at these different factors, like what they’re charging for storage, what they’re charging for lost inventory, and then challenging them on it whenever we see a problem. And then they’ll correct it.”

The Chinese Copycat Threat

Here’s a little fun fact for you. Might be a little scary.

There are over 3,000 new Amazon Seller Central accounts created every day. Most of them are in China.

If your product can be knocked off tomorrow, buyers know it, and they will price it accordingly, or they won’t even come to the table to talk to you about buying your business.

Let’s say you’ve got a product that’s selling well, but it’s not unique. This is actually a really common problem on Amazon.

You’ve got no patent. You’ve got no proprietary formula. Someone can just come in, take your product, copy it, undercut you on price, and now they’ve taken your business.

So where can we find moats?

We want to think of this maybe in a two- to five-year kind of range, kind of script out what can I do to be competitive?

Maybe if you can’t get a patent on the product, maybe there’s other things you can do. But we want to try to fight against copycats.

I will say one thing that’s good about Amazon from this standpoint.

Back in 2019, 2020, the Chinese copycats were destroying Amazon US businesses. They were spinning up cheap knockoffs, selling them super fast, undercutting you on price, and knocking out businesses.

And so over time, Amazon realized, “Ooh, we’re hurting our own reputation here.”

So what Amazon did is they started to value history more than they value just competitive price.

So today, I’m pleased to announce that when you look at the Amazon landscape today, Amazon seems to really be weighting history and reputation way more than they ever have.

But you still need to think about how to build the moat.

Okay, so obviously design patents are good. Utility patents are the holy grail. Proprietary formulation, something that someone can’t take from you.

Another one I thought of: bundled products.

One thing I see that sellers do a lot: you’ve got a competitor. I sell this blue widget. You sell this blue widget. They’re very similar, but I throw these other two additional things in with my blue widget that are nice to have, and now people want to buy mine over yours.

You want brand equity that commands loyalty, not just recognition.

A+ content and brand stores that convert at a significantly higher rate.

Diversification across enough SKUs that no single copycat can take you down.

A direct-to-consumer channel that reduces Amazon dependency.

The questions buyers are asking: What makes this hard to replicate?

Have a good answer for that.

Operational Maturity & SKU Metrics

Let’s talk a little bit about operational maturity.

At this stage of the Amazon game, it’s a game of inches. The operators who are winning are the ones who’ve professionalized everything.

What it looks like: you’ve got your supply chain dialed in. You’re not getting killed by Amazon storage fees. Your inventory velocity is optimized.

Run your Amazon business like a real business.

Know your operations. Get into all the little minutiae details that are going to help you have an edge.

Know what your contribution margin is per SKU. Understand which SKUs are adding to the bottom line versus those that are taking away from the bottom line.

Understand your return rates by product.

If you’re speaking this language fluently, buyers trust that you will understand your business, and then they’ll be more inclined to buy.

How about supply chain resilience? Do you have a backup supplier?

You know, when I do private equity deals, the first thing every private equity firm does when they buy a deal, let’s say they’re buying a $25 million business, when they come in, their first move is to add a backup supplier.

Because most sellers that we see have a single point of failure in one supplier.

If you go to the trouble of building a backup supplier and having them do 10% or 15% of your orders, you are now protected from catastrophe.

When catastrophe hits, you literally can say, “Hey, we need to move this production over to the backup supplier while we work through these issues.”

Buyers have seen too many acquisitions get hammered by supply chain disruptions.

They’re going to ask these questions on the front end. At least they will if they’re a good buyer.Realistic Growth vs. Hockey-Stick Charts

Okay, so here’s another one. You’ve got to have a realistic growth story.

Buyers are very skeptical of the hockey-stick projections. You know what the first thing they always ask me is? They say, “Well, if this thing is growing like that, why is the seller wanting to sell it?”

You’ve got to have a believable roadmap. New products, new channels, international expansion. And there’s all these different kinds of things that you can do, but you haven’t validated any of those. We’re sort of presenting them to the buyer as this guaranteed upside.

You know what the buyers want? They want you to show them what is already working so that they can underwrite the future themselves.

They want to see something that has solid fundamentals, that has modest growth, and that has good margins that look promising for the future.

Creating a Turnkey Product Roadmap

Here’s one thing I would recommend when we talk about future growth.

I think it’s really smart, especially on Amazon, for a seller to build a roadmap of products that are turnkey for a new buyer.

So let’s just say you’re selling the business now, and when we get on the buyer-seller call, you’re able to say, “Hey, you know what? I already have my products lined out for this whole year. We’re going to launch one product every two months. We’ve got them all ready to go. The supplier has already given us samples. We’re going to launch them systematically, and here’s where we are in the process.”

What that does for a buyer is they say, “Hey, this is not just some willy-nilly, you’re going to grow, look at the hockey stick.”

It is an actual playbook that shows what’s actually going on with these deals. It shows what products you have in the roadmap.

They come look at it and say, “You know, I’m going to buy this today, but I don’t have any revenue for this new product he’s got over here.”

So keep that in mind. Having a product roadmap that you’ve developed out is huge for a new buyer coming in.

Sometimes sellers will take that information and be like, “Well, if I’m going to go to the trouble of building those products, I’d rather experience that growth myself.”

Well, that’s fine. If you want to do that, that’s fine.

It’s still really important to try to have a product roadmap when you go to sell your business.

So I would just plan that you’re not going to sell at the absolute top. Don’t be thinking like that.

Try to figure out how to sell in a way that makes it easier to get through the transaction and allows you to move on to the things that are more important to you.

Whatever it is, that new business idea, taking some time off, whatever that next thing is.What Drives Premium Multiples

This is what we’ve seen actually move the needle on valuation.

It’s not a single trick or a hack. It’s a combination of clean, verifiable financials with strong unit economics, defensibility that gives buyers confidence in durability, operational maturity that signals low transaction risk, and a believable story backed by demonstrated execution.

The founders who get premium multiples aren’t the ones with the highest revenues. They’re the ones who built businesses that a buyer can confidently operate and grow.

The Amazon exit landscape is more sophisticated than it was just a few years ago.

Buyers have learned from their mistakes. They’re more diligent. They’re more skeptical. They’re more focused on fundamentals.

That’s actually good news if you’ve built a real business. It means the premium goes to the operators who’ve done the work.

If this was useful, please subscribe. We’re going to keep sharing what buyers are actually telling us, not theory.

This comes from our actual real-life experience.